Someone could question how it happened that Agathocles
and anyone like him, after infinite betrayals and cruelties, could live
for a long
time secure in his fatherland, defend himself against
external enemies, and never be conspired against by his citizens, inasmuch
as many
others have not been able to maintain their states
through cruelty even in peaceful times, not to mention uncertain times
of war. I believe
that this comes from cruelties badly used or well
used. Those can be called well used (if it is permissible to speak
well of evil) that are
done at a stroke, out of the necessity to secure
oneself, and then are not persisted in but are turned to as much utility
for the subjects as
one can. Those cruelties are badly used which,
though few in the beginning, rather grow with time than are eliminated.
Those who
observe the first mode can have some remedy for
their state with God and with men, as had Agathocles;
as for the others it is impossible
for them to maintain themselves.
-Machiavelli,
The
Prince, Chapter VIII, Of Those Who Have Attained a Principality through
Crimes

Karl Popper's great
contribution to science was the idea that we can never know a scientific
hypothesis or theory to be "true", we can only know it to be the best available
explanation for an observed phenomenon until it is proven false.
The key to this insight is the notion of falsifiabilty; when we find evidence
that refutes a theory, no matter how elegant and compelling that theory
may have seemed, we must acknowledge it to be flawed, perhaps even totally
false. Sadly, the social sciences have remained largely immune to
this important insight, and historians, economists, sociologists, evolutionists
and the like have continued
to insist that their theories are correct no matter what proof is presented
that shows them to be wrong. In this book, Caleb Carr appears to
represent a classic example of the historian who has been so seduced by
the tidiness of his own theory that he is either unwilling or incapable
of recognizing the evidence that contradicts it. This blind stubbornness
mars what is otherwise a very interesting essay on terrorism and terroristic
warfare.

Mr. Carr enunciates a relatively serviceable general rule, that terrorism
is :

...simply the contemporary name given to, and the
modern permutation of, warfare deliberately waged against civilians
with the purpose of destroying their will to support
either leaders or policies that the agents of such violence find objectionable.

This seems unnecessarily overbroad, incorporating, as it does, even
warfare pursued by duly constituted nation-states (including the liberal
democracies of the West), for wholly legitimate purposes, as for instance
the strategic bombing campaigns waged against Germany and Japan by the
United States in WWII. Still, even if one would not personally equate
such actions with terrorist acts undertaken by private groups, one could
accept such a definition for the purposes of argument. But then Mr. Carr
adds the corollary that :

Warfare against civilians, whether inspired by hatred,
revenge, greed, or political and psychological insecurity, has been one
of the most ultimately self-defeating tactics in
all of military history--indeed, it would be difficult to think of one
more inimical
to its various practitioners' causes....[T]he nation
or faction that resorts to warfare against civilians most quickly, most
often,
and most viciously is the nation or faction most
likely to see its interests frustrated and, in many cases, its existence
terminated.

The silliness of this assertion becomes apparent when he correctly notes
that the United States has repeatedly pursued this kind of absolute warfare,
particularly in the Civil War, Indian Wars, and WWII, which, unfortunately
for the validity of his thesis are three of the most complete victories
in the history of warfare. If total war is counterproductive, how
do we explain the enduring peace that these three wars brought?

Mr. Carr attempts to skirt this issue by portraying the Civil War as
only a partial victory because the South remained unreconciled to union
and to full rights for blacks, resorting even to terrorism, in the form
of the Ku Klux Klan, and by saying that post-War economic aid made WWII
unique. Yet Mr. Carr also says that the ultimate aim of war
should be peace, and judged by his own terms, these wars must be considered
some of the most successful of all time. In the Civil War, the North
not only defeated the South but established the inviolability of the Union
in such absolute terms that it has never been seriously threatened again.
By the end of the Indian Wars, not only had the Native American tribes
been reduced to impotence, the notion that any ethnic group might assert
its rights militarily was effectively laid to rest. After WWII, not
only were Japan and Germany transformed from perennially martial to at
least temporarily pacific societies, no other nation since has been foolhardy
enough to challenge American might, out of a certainty that when push comes
to shove America will readily resort to even nuclear weapons. Contrary
to Mr. Carr's argument, it seems hard to dismiss the evidence that the
waging of total war has reaped enormous benefits for the United States.

In fact, I would argue further that the failure to resort to total war
in other modern conflicts has had disastrous consequences for the United
States. The U.S. should probably never have intervened in WWI, but
once it did, had Imperial Germany been utterly destroyed, there might never
have been a WWII. Likewise, America could have strangled the Russian
Revolution in its crib at that point, but instead sent only a token force
to try to disrupt things. Even worse, after defeating the totalitarian
powers of Germany and Japan, America's failure to destroy the totalitarian
Soviet Union in 1945 led to almost a half-century of further mass murder,
genocide, brush and proxy war, crippling defense budgets, and the like.
And in the course of the long Cold War, when America was offered repeated
opportunities to employ total war--for instance we could have simply removed
Castro or annihilated Communist China, North Korea, and North Vietnam--our
reluctance to do so increased human suffering, here and abroad, and prolonged
the conflicts. It seems then that unlimited war, far from being counterproductive,
has been fabulously successful, at least when waged by a great democracy,
which can cloak itself, whether fairly or not, in a mantle of moral righteousness
(for more on this see Victor Davis Hansons's excellent books : Soul
of Battle and Carnage and Culture).

However, Mr. Carr is on somewhat stronger footing when he argues that
intentionally attacking civilians may be morally dubious. Much of
the book really offers Mr. Carr's case for the professionalization of militaries
and of warfare, and the idea that killing in wartime should be restricted
exclusively to armed combatants. He apparently wants to turn the
clock back to the time when sightseers would pack picnic lunches and go
out to watch two armies fight one another, a common enough occurrence up
to and including the American Civil War. Indeed, if such an orderly
kind of warfare were still plausible, it just might make sense to seek
its return. But, setting aside the question of whether it is still
possible to wage a narrowly limited war, there is a serious case to be
made for the opposing viewpoint : that war should be carried to the civilian
populace of belligerent nations for the express purpose of turning them
against their current regime, if possible, and if not--since as Mr. Carr
correctly points out, such attacks often do steel the nerves of civilians
and unite them behind even unpopular regimes for the duration of the attacks--then
to ensure that the populace will be so battle-scarred as to oppose any
future government that might seek to pursue a policy of military aggression.
For instance, it may well be the case that the firebombing of Tokyo served
to strengthen Japanese resolve to resist Allied invasion, but it is unquestionably
true that the profound ruination and mass killing that was visited upon
the Japanese people in those conventional bombings and in the subsequent
atomic bombings turned them into one of the most conflict averse polities
in the modern world. The annihilation of hundreds of thousands, even
millions of people, through the lethal means of total warfare may be a
horrible prospect to contemplate, but if for instance the killing of even
a million citizens of the nascent Soviet Union in 1919 might have saved
ten million Russian lives over the next few decades, we must not be too
hasty in abjuring total war.

It also seems fair to debate the question of whether the citizens of
even a despotic regime do not in some sense deserve to be made targets
of warfare. We may find it somewhat comforting to pretend that only
Hitler deserves the blame for the crimes of Nazi Germany, but didn't the
German people allow him to rise to and stay in power? And isn't it
more likely, and more realistic, that large numbers of the German people
had to actively collaborate in Nazi activities (as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
showed in his book, Hitler's Willing
Executioners) and that many more had to knowingly and willingly acquiesce?
If it is the case, and I would argue that it is, that all governments are
to some degree consensual, then perhaps we serve a useful purpose when
we subject entire populations to retaliation for the evil acts of their
governments. This is at least a topic that Mr. Carr might have addressed,
but he does not.

That Mr. Carr fumbles several of his own arguments so badly is especially
unfortunate because much else of what he has to say is worth hearing.
In particular, his argument that the United States should develop the capability
to more effectively pursue limited warfare, and his assertion that the
threat of terrorism is better faced via limited warfare than by means of
unlimited warfare, both seem quite correct. Of course, it is not
at all clear who his argument is with, since America is very carefully
pursuing just such limited warfare in the current war. Every effort
was made in Afghanistan to assure that civilians were not wantonly attacked.
Types of weaponry with which Mr. Carr is enamored--like the AC-130 gunship
and the RQ-1A Predator missile-equipped drone--are being used, and less
discriminating weapons like nuclear bombs are not. If, as turned
out to be the case in Afghanistan, we can destroy an enemy army and the
terrorists they harbor with minimal damage to the surrounding society,
then by all means we should do so. But as the war turns to other
theaters, to Iraq and North Korea, maybe even to Palestine and Lebanon
and Syria and Iran and Indonesia, we may not be able to achieve the same
level of precision, yet this should not, indeed can not, deter us, if our
goal is to forge a lasting peace between the West and the Islamic world.

The most salient example today of a situation where a Western nation
may be forced to pursue unlimited war is Israel in its conflict with Palestine.
Were it the case that all Israel faced was a discrete number of terrorists
who were recognized even within their own society to have exceeded the
bounds of tolerable behavior, then it might be possible for Israel to limit
its response to going after those terrorists. But the situation in
Palestine seems to have reached a point where the Palestinian population
generally supports even the most heinous attacks on Jewish civilians.
In this climate, it may well become necessary for Israel to wage an unlimited
war against the Palestinian people. It may be that the only choice
remaining to Israel is to destroy Palestine and kill many Palestinians
or to accept continued murderous attacks on her own people. If this
is the choice, then Mr. Carr's position, that intentionally inflicting
civilian casualties is morally unacceptable, amounts to nothing more than
a suicide pact, that may assuage some tender Western moral qualms but only
at the expense of the discontinuation of the state of Israel.
That is not a price that any responsible and morally serious person should
be willing to pay.

Comments:

It seems like in the aftermath of 9/11 much of the United States went mad, spouting wishful, overwrought, "heartfelt" nonsense. Mister Carr's contribution is so clearly of this emotionally addled class of work, I wonder if it doesn't deserve polite and sympathetic silence instead of a reveiw at all. That same silence we accored the traumatized bereaved, the distraught widow who bawls, "he was a wonderful man," as her deceased husband, notoriously unwonderful, is lowered into the dirt.

One of terror's effects on the US civilian population resulted in this unfortunate book.